It was a quiet weekend for this avid indoors gal, I call it “spelunking time”. Those of you who know that term…some times called “caving”, an outdoorsman term used when you go explore deep underground caves. For the indoors man, its deep exportation of old emotional and psychic patterns. Old bits that, if left unattended, can wreck havoc to the system. But its winter, the cold air has come, storm season, and a great time to go inside to do some indoor spelunking.

Repressed emotions do not go away. They do not disappear with time, they get buried and then reactivate at the next great obstacle. (See: “my partner and I broke up and suddenly I feel like I am five again when my father walked out”). Neither do they vanish when we are present and still, although I recognize that this myth is wildly projected. However, this is a myth. A myth that we love to hope for…(See: “If I was enlightened I would never feel pain again!”). However, repressed emotion tends to resurface from their buried homes in the body, and often comes up to be healed when we get still and present. You may have noticed. But perhaps you decided this was because you were not enlightened enough, or because when you look at the teachers, it was projected that they don’t experience any pain, and the myth continued. (See: “real enlightenment is this painless, past less, harm free, state”)

In the post enlightenment experience there is simply no “person” to mind the pain, and its free to arise. For me this weekend it was really yummy to slow the world down and be still and fish out those bits of old emotion…welcome winter, welcome down time, welcome dark nights! I recognize that some enlightened folks hang out in the spacious mind, and see the spaciousness in all form and never really touch form much. Others, like myself, find such a love and intimacy with the forms that they are all welcome and savored and “ordinary life” is lived fully on. Regardless, there is no space enlightened or not, where pain does not arise. (well except for a very, very few…not solely because they are “enlightened mind you…* See the below exceptions.)

It is however, the suffering that rarely occurs. The suffering is the resistance to the arising of emotion, repressing it down into the system. Resistance to whats going on, is suffering. This is different than pure emotion arising. Suffering is the resistance to the arising of the form, or say..whatever emotions may be coming up,old repressed onesor simply the present emotions that are responses to stimuli… Resistance is primarily what an ego is made of. Ego’s suffer. No ego, very little suffering. No ego, all is welcome to arise..( and this includes pain.)

Now I recommend this spelunking practice to everyone. Winter has arrived, trees wither, cold air pushes us inside, time for the dark nights…dark nights of the soul are also welcome. I fully recommend some spelunking time to root out those old repressed emotions that need some liberation, and are an essential part of your path towards total liberation. Bring those old pains up to the light…Liberate the repressed pain…Hallelujah! Also, doing this voluntarily can save you hundreds of dollars at the chiropractor and the Oncologist. Pick up some tissues on sale during this season and have your self a quiet bit of downtime. Happy spelunking!

* exception to the rule: there are some humans who are vastly pain free…I call them Kharmic Light: They are 1) usually born in a first world country, AND 2) had wonderful parents and a trauma free early life AND 3) came to full conscious awakenings early on..before the age of 30….. If that is you, awesome..skip this lesson, you and the 5 others on the planet don’t have to worry about this at all.

The stillness, the spaciousness….
That day about 7 years ago, when I “woke up”, what it actually felt like, was that my mind blew a fuse. It got really quiet. And things that, until that exact moment, had shape and meaning, became space, empty space. Instead of seeing the wall of my bedroom, all I could see was a choice. I could only see a choice to see all this space as a wall.I could see a deep collective history of choice that this particular space will be seen as “wall”.
I literally became primarily identified as the vast space that is every thing’s essence. Space became my foreground, and still is, so many years later. The filter that turns that space into forms, like walls and such, was not in operation. My mind blew a fuse. No better way to know what exactly “mind” is than to have it suddenly shut off. Without the filter of the mind…space. All space. But the space has movement. The movement feels like love. Is love. At the quantum level, love is what is created when space, the source of all forms, moves.
And love too has movement, that movement becomes what we feel and know as form. All the forms of our universe from human atoms to the galaxy’s. And also, curiously, all this space can be aware of itself. There is not something that is aware of space, there is only space, aware of space. Nothing separate from itself, the heart of all forms only noticing the heart itself. Space is aware. Weird.
My experience of being “awake” simply means awareness is primarily aware of itself first, and identifies as form in a very distant second. Odd. For some time,all the forms that are shaped out of space were very much in the background and could hardly be seen distinctive from the space, but we don’t need to get into that just yet…No need to blow the mind all at once. Cuz I’ve been there, done that and its not terribly comfortable.

One could say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.” The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE. -Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time Ch 8.

You may have noticed there is another way to bust up the Kharma…by living a total chaotic mess. Sometimes you just can’t catch the suffering until its in mid stream and you are about to punch out the man in the parking lot for taking your spot. Okay, so that too can happen. And its very painful. That’s the kinda stuff that the old zen teacher is pointing to when you read “careful not to take too much suffering from someone, they may need that suffering to wake up”. Its a strange and awkward thing us humans have going on…for some reason it has to get unbearably painful to wake up. And how much pain a human can endure seems almost endless. Its can get real, real bad up in there before the alarm goes off and change becomes an option. I wish it was otherwise, I truly wish we all understood that fear and pain can push you towards an evolution, but vision, and joy, what I like to call Joy body, can inspire. Imagine if us humans just needed inspiration to make change…But we’re not there yet. So, the other way you get to burn out your Kharmic pain is to simply live it. The big Kharmic wipe out. So if you, or your buddy, seems to be caught in some endless pattern of pain, be gentle. Its still the primary operating system we have going on. Eventually its going to get so bad, it will stop. I know its hard to watch, but common…we’ve all been there.

So, once that knot dissolves, and the yummy relief is felt…you may notice several more knots rising up to be dissolved. I won’t lie to you, it can become addictive…busting up the knots, dissolving the emotional field, ending the wicked rant going on in your head. Yup, it can be super awesome. So just know, its totally fine to start doing it all the time. And in the middle of the night, when a pain body or rant wakes you up out of a dead sleep, its okay to do it there too….after awhile you will notice a considerable amount of peace and ease where you used to panic, fear, worry, and fret,etc. Its not without discomfort, yup, it can be a heck of a lot of discomfort busting up some of the big knots. But actual transformation is available. Its tricky not to get lost at the emotional field…stick with the physical sensation, don’t waver from the physical place or you’ll be back in the hell you know so very well. You can get the help of a friend…Try an Eckhart Tolle you tube or some teacher with a lot of awareness, play the tape, or podcast and get saturated in the stillness…keep it playing in the background for help. That emotional field can be very sticky and hard to get out of!!!

And also worth mentioning….busting up kharma is not “in order to” get closer to God or anything….its a solution to big Kharmic Pain-in-the ass! You can get real, real close to God messed up just as you are. Its just that it is possible to end your deep, ages old, suffering. Those horrific patterns don’t HAVE to hang about.

I like the word Kharma. I like that it can mean some baggage right now, and baggage with a past. I like the word pain body too, such a great descriptive saying from Eckhart Tolle.
This is what I know about dissolving Kharmic pain bodies…
First off, when we suffer or are in the sudden grip of an “owie, be it a rage, a grief, an anxiety attack, a panic attack, anything really that just feels awful, that is your pain body. Or as I like to say Kharmic pain. We have 3 layers to that pain. The first layer is up at the top of your body, in the head,”yap, yap, yaping” away. In my case its often a rant of some kind, but you will recognize it, you know it well…the irritated yapping mind. A seemingly endless stream of irritated thought. There is a second layer, if you were to imaging a cord dangling down from that chatty thought stream, and you followed it down, down, you would discover an emotional field, perhaps say grief, or rage, or anxiety, panic, depression, or anything that contains fear and unhappiness. Then follow the line down from that to the third layer, a physical sensation. Usually it feels like a muscle knot, but a knot in some very hard to reach part of your body. Usually you can feel it behind your heart, or in your ribcage, but really it can be located anywhere. Regardless, you can feel it, and it won’t take much to notice that particularly vibrating ache.
So here is the trick. Stay with the physical sensation. Hold it in your awareness. Like you can be aware of your breath if I ask you to do that…a soft kind of listening. Awareness can be very potent when used correctly. So, very closely, like your awareness were touching it, holding it, focus on that physical knot. Be aware of touching it, not the distance of an observation, but the intimate sensation of touch. Now simply stay there, unwavering and unmoving. Like our beautiful zen brothers have taught us, by sitting..totally unmoved at the wall. Stay with your awareness touching that physical sensation. Regardless of the emotional story, which will get very big and try to grab your awareness, or your thoughts which will get very seductive and strategic,ie) “This is so stupid, lets go back to the music page…” or “Did I forget to turn off the stove?”, and the best ” I think this is making it worse”. Regardless of the thoughts brewing up a storm, stay put. Simply stay with the one act of touching the physical sensation.
If you drift away, simply come back to the sensation of the physical knot. Stay there and you will notice…perhaps it takes a couple of minutes, perhaps much less, but you will notice that the physical sensation will dissolve. And with it, the emotional field and the irritated though stream. It will dissolve for all time. That particular pain body, that particular ache, will dissolve and be transformed into a much more comfortable ease.
Kharmic pain can be dissolved. I know you may have heard otherwise…So, don’t take my word for it. Directly experience it yourself, channel your inner Zen dude, and try it out.

Its been said so many times, there are no words to describe this experience. There is no beginning, no middle, no end. Because there is only this one moment, this taste…ahhh, there is goes, escapes before I can hold it. And another fills it. So complete, so full, so without any trace. And there is no need for traces to be made, to trace a path, or evoke the experience, because we only miss another moment of this fullness in the meantime. Here we all are, so plump full of this very moment, with its taste, smell, various emotions, various hungers, and sensations. We are all so full that no one is able to stand outside of it and to make complete observations about it. Not really. But we try, and fail, and darn…we missed another mouth full of this fullness. Too busy living it, too busy being it, but the fullness desires to be expressed, so we try…but essentially we are too busy to capture it just right. Tried to, failed, and NOW… just too damn full again.

There are a million platitudes. There are millions of facebook quotes on a “NOW” moment. The 30 second sound bite for an evolved spiritual outlook is everywhere. One day, very soonish after I disappeared and stillness remained, I went for dinner with a friend. I had very little to no words, there was no “me” to tell “you” I died. I just was stillness. I just lived and breathed and was the full embodiment of each moment. And so, for some goofy reason, I got to bear witness to her telling me all about what enlightened people are like. It just kinda came up. So I got the story…..”They are very happy all the time, they have no worries, no problems, they are very still, they can sit for hours and never get sore. They are…blah, blah, blah”. The story of the happily-ever-after that we can all achieve if we are good enough, pray enough, cleanse enough, are reborn enough. Its the creepiest and most distorted story. But that’s the story. It doesn’t include any truth, because the full embodiment of NOW can certainly include jealousy, and rage, and sadness, it can also include sore bodies, and uncertain outcomes. Eckhart misses plane connections, Amaji gets food poisoning, Papaji worked 10 hours a day at heavy manual labor. But the reality of enlightenment does not save a place for that dream of peace. Its unimaginable and unpalatable to imagine that peace is right here, in the middle of road rage, or on the dentists chair in pain. That the broken heart can have anything to do with Enlightenment. That the most alive and real moments we have, are all the same. And for those of us who are awake, we get to fully embody it without any filters or distance. And inside that embodiment is the full grace of peace, regardless what it looks like. But who the hell wants to hear that story? And so 100 times a day, the truth of an embodied awakened life is disregarded, for something that is far more pretty, like a Hollywood movie, and posted in a 30 second sound bite.

And so it goes that we are ever unfolding into ourselves, into our evolution, into our future. We are ever expanding, regardless of being enlightened or not, regardless of practicing, of wishing, of manifesting, regardless even of sitting on our asses, asleep at the wheel.And at the same time we are forever kinda incomplete to the “idea” of what or whom we desire to be. And in this tension, whether its conscious or not, we create…Everyday is a beautiful creation from the position of “lacking” “hurting” “striving” “incomplete” in bold or subtle ways, and therefore always some kind of movement towards feeling somehow complete. And in this, is the creation, is the evolution. A very constant motion of living…a very constant motion of creation. And ironically, your perfect, completeness includes a movement of trying to feel complete. And from God’s point of view, you are welcome to stop and feel complete in this very moment, and you are welcome to stop and feel incomplete in this very moment. Either way, its all the Same. Perfect now, imperfect now, its up to you, cuz in reality..Same Same.

Six years ago I died. I died into a bliss. In a moment, sitting on the bed, changing shoes for a date, and suddenly I was gone. A spontaneous and complete Awakening it later became known as…sort of. 3 days later when this spaciousness that used to be my body found that body, it wrote, ” Such a strange death this is, a suicide, I have died into bliss.” Slowly some others found me, or I found them and with support I began to learn how to live in the bliss. How to live without identification, how to live primarily as space. Its not at all what you think…

The years go by, each week someone loved shows up and says”talk to me, share it with me, help me.” One friend in a dark, sad, place recently said ” please let me ride your wisdom through this part”. So in love I reach out. I have no idea how to share, how to help. I have no idea most of the time what the hell I am doing. That’s part of how this life goes…that’s the part of being “Present” they never tell you about. But perhaps you know it already, for yourself, in your own way…late at night when you admit to yourself, you don’t know what the hell your doing….It may scare you, but I guess I’m here to say….you may just be on to something there.